Crawford waits a beat. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” I snarl. “Didn’t you bail her out of jail?”
“No.” Crawford watches the road. “For right now, until you deal with Jaxon, she’s safer in there.”
“Now who’s the bastard.” Bitterness rises in my throat. “I can’t believe it.”
“Really?Youcan’t believe that you drove someone off and fucked it all up?”
“I wouldn’t have fucked it up if she had just trusted me.” I slam my still-bloody knuckles into the window.
Crawford snorts derisively.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Say it.”
“Look, Salinger, I know you, okay? We may have been low-contact for the last several years, but I highly doubt you’ve changed much since we were kids. You…” He hesitates. “You are a lot like Dad. A lot like me too,” he adds before I can slug him in the face. “You’re on an emotional hair trigger, you hold grudges, you think you’re right all the time, you react to slights with an excessive display of force, and you’re not someone people cross without good reason. Shit, you blew a crater in your own brother’s company just to get back at him for a slight from when we were younger.”
“You make us sound old.” I stare out the window at passing traffic.
“We’re in our thirties. We are adult men, officially older than Dad was when he had us. If you’d started having kids when Dad did, you’d have a teenager right now.”
“Fuck off,” I mumble.
My brother sighs and turns on his blinker. “At a certain point, you have to grow up. You have to be responsible for your own actions. The shit that happened to us in our childhood is not our fault, but itisour responsibility, and part of that responsibility is not letting it infect everything and everyone around us.”
“If you’re going to give me a lecture, you can just take me back to jail.”
“Man the fuck up, Salinger. You need to fix this stalker problem.”
I cross my arms. “You just told me violence isn’t the answer.”
“I thought you were supposed to be the villain, the second-most-hated man in the Svensson clan. But you want to whack Jaxon with a baseball bat in a dark alley?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s the finesse? Where’s the grand plan? Do better. Live up to your own hype.”
45
MANDY
“You stink!” Lauren wrinkles her nose.
“You don’t smell that bad,” Jess assures me as I follow the warden out to where my family is waiting for me.
I spent all weekend in jail, crying. Worrying about Pepper. Running over in my head what had happened and where it had gone wrong and what I should do about it.
“You look so puffy.” Lauren pokes me under the eye.
“Oh, Mandy.” My mother bursts into tears as she and my dad hug me.
“I’m sorry,” I wail at my parents. “I don’t know what happened.”
“It’s Lauren.” Amy is shrill. “She has terrible taste in men.”
